


The Sickening Feeling of Falling Awake

by AnonEMouse



Series: When your heart is broken all you can do is break, too [2]
Category: Captain America (2011), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Gen, I'd be so depressed in his position, It's really not that graphic but probably not for kids, Poor Cap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-04
Updated: 2012-06-04
Packaged: 2017-11-06 19:06:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/422159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnonEMouse/pseuds/AnonEMouse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He remembers everything as if it just happened yesterday.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Sickening Feeling of Falling Awake

**Author's Note:**

> So, here's another musing on an Avenger's character. I've retroactively made Bird of Prey the first part in what is sure to be an incredibly depressing series of these things. I'll apologize in advance for anyone who gets bummed out by this. So far, these have been a pretty big bummer to write. I can't promise to do this for all the Avengers because they're not all equally interesting to me, but I've got a couple more outlined, at least.

He remembers the crash.

He doesn’t tell them that. 

He tells them about making the decision to crash the plane, about that final transmission with Peggy, and then he says something about blackness and nothingness and he shrugs and gives them his toothiest smile and watches as everyone, even Director Fury, kind of melts and they let him go.

He doesn’t tell them about pushing the plane as fast as it would go, praying the crash would be enough to kill him—he’d taken so many bullets and been impacted by so many grenades and shells that the med officers started joking that it was like he didn’t heal injuries so much as his body rejected death. He doesn’t talk about the panic that came when he realized he’d underestimated his trajectory and would hit ice, not water. He doesn’t tell them about glass shattering in his face or a cold so immediate and sharp he thought he was on fire or the disappointment he felt when he knew he was still alive. He doesn’t say that his last thought as he closed his eyes and knew he was freezing was— _Thank God it’s over._

He remembers waking up.

It felt like waking from a nightmare and realizing he wasn’t awake after all.

Everything is wrong, he knows. The game on the radio is from Before, before Erskine and Stark and Rebirth, before Captain America and all the rest. And the bed is too comfortable. No bed has ever felt like that, soft and hard at the same time. And the dame—the woman, agent—she's all wrong. Her gaze is too direct, her manner of address too…practiced. Like she's reciting lines. He knows what faking it looks like.

The city is so much _bigger_ , and _louder_ , and people and cars are everywhere and nothing makes sense except that this is not like Before. And that man—Fury—is calling him Cap like he knows him, like Fury has the right to call him what only his closest friends did. And then it sinks in, surrounded by the foreign and unknown, and he knows he is in the future, and everything from Before is gone. And he is alone, and there is no one he knows left, and no one knows him, and he’d missed his date with Peggy and maybe that's the biggest loss of them all. She was his last chance to be Steve, and with her gone, Steve is gone, and all that's left is the Captain. And he hates the Captain. Sometimes. Most of the time.

He remembers Peggy.

God, does he remember Peggy.

She was the most beautiful dame he’d ever seen, and smarter than him, and braver than him, and everything he’d ever wanted or thought to want. And she was his. She belonged to him, she loved him. She knew Steve from before he was anything, and she knew the Captain and all the awful shit he’d done and seen, and she knew Cap who cooked beans over a camp fire and laughed at Bucky’s bad jokes, and she loved them all and God sometimes, sometimes he wants to cry when he thinks of all that is left of her. 

There’s a cold stone in a row of cold stones outside London and a family that smiles at him but is clearly uncomfortable having him around, a reminder that their mother, grandmother, _wife_ , had seen some things and done some things no one liked talking about anymore. The husband is an old, old man, as old as him but this Other Man looks old though his mind is still sharp. He knows exactly who he is and what he meant to Peggy. They hate each other on principle, because the Other Man, who is a good man, too, got the life he lost in the serum and the cold. And the Other Man doesn’t say it but the truth lay between them like the serrated edge of a knife—every morning Peggy would wake with a smile and the shape of a name on her lips then she would look and know that she was with the Other Man, and for just one second she would wish to be asleep again and to say the name she was thinking and he would smile back and they would be together in her dream, if nowhere else.

He remembers the camps.

There were rumors, but then there were so many rumors no one was sure what to believe.

There’s a photo of him, a giant picture like a billboard, hanging in a museum in Washington. They’ve invited him for a day of remembrance. He lights a candle and speaks quietly to a group of people—some are old and have tattoos on their arms—about finding Janowska just days after rescuing Bucky, and he tells them that at first he didn’t understand what he was seeing. He feels the tears on his face but makes no move to wipe them away or even acknowledge them because the part of his soul they come from has never stopped weeping, never stopped feeling the initial wave of horror and disbelief at what was happening, so much worse than anyone knew or tried to know.

What he doesn’t say is that he threw up. That he took his gun, and Falsworth’s, and all the ammo he could jam into his suit, and that he killed every guard he came across, that he didn’t give them quick deaths but that he stood over them and left bullets in their guts and knives in their livers and that one man, who said, _Ich bin für das Lager verantwortlich_ , he left hanging off a fence by his bowels, still alive when he pulled his guts out and strung him up. He doesn’t say these things because the big poster behind him shows him with survivors, and they’re all rictus smiles in shorn heads as he and the Commandos lead them through a fence torn down. That image is all hope and survival. There's no place for the kind of black blood that comes from a liver or the stench that rises from bowels cut loose in this quiet place where ghosts are laid to rest and the survivors look for solace and they come together in the name of a better future.

He remembers being nothing and nobody.

His apartment was tiny and had roaches and his whole life was one long fight for whatever scraps he could grab.

Do they expect him to be bigoted? He thinks they do. They look at him every time Fury gives him an order, like they’re waiting for him to say or do something to show he thinks he’s better than Fury because of the color of his skin. But he was never like that—for Christ’s sake, he’s the one who nominated Jones and Morita to serve on his squad. He’d spent too much time being judged—for being too small, too sickly, too Irish—to make that same mistake. He didn’t make it then, and he doesn’t make it now.

They’ve got him on this morning show, smiling the Captain’s stupid smile, the one that covers up the death and that even as he sits here he’s cataloguing exits and who he’d have to kill to get out fastest. He’s talking up the Avengers. Market research—that’s a job now?—says people like him best, find him less grating than Stark, so he’s the one assigned publicity duty. Some things never change. He doesn’t like sitting in front of these windows so exposed, but he knows Hawkeye is out there somewhere, covering his six. Hawkeye understands why he always sits with his back to the wall and likes a clear sight line to an exit. They ask him about modern society and laugh and josh him like they think he must be so shocked by all the goings-on. He raises an ironic brow and gives them his best XO look and says, _Why do I care about what people do? Do you think you invented sex? I assure you we had it plenty back then, too_. Somewhere off camera he can hear Stark’s loud, raucous laugh.

He remembers his first time.

It was Before, with the prostitute, Anneliese, he paid to model for him.

He only ever paid her to model. He rarely had the scratch to afford it, and when he did, he really wanted to work on his drawings, but when Anneliese learned it was his twenty-fifth birthday and he’d never had anyone, she took pity on him and lead him to her bed and then he wasn’t a virgin anymore. He wanted to say he had more pride than to accept a pity fuck—and yes, they had that word back then, too—but he was so lonely and starved for any kind of acceptance that he took what Anneliese was offering and didn’t feel too bad about it. 

He never did learn how to talk to women, though, or how to dance, or even go on a proper date. There was Erskine and the serum and everything changed and he didn’t have to talk to women. They handed him hotel room keys and he went to their rooms and fucked without ever saying a word. The only difference between sex then and now is that the kind of gal who’d let you do that to her then wasn’t a nice girl—which he never understood because letting a fella rut was about the nicest thing a dame could do—and now a person’s “number” was worn like a badge of honor. He regrets never having Peggy, never taking her up on the offer of the red dress. But back then, a gal like Peggy went on a pedestal and that’s where he put her, thinking they would have time After. But After was the cold and waking up in a room that was all wrong. And now there’s just whatever woman he can lay without her going to the magazines. He still doesn’t know how to talk to them.

He remembers being handy with broken things.

He spent his childhood cooped up in the asthma ward with nothing to do but take things apart and put them back together again.

They think he’s stupid. He can tell because he isn’t stupid. He wasn’t Before and then the serum did something to him, in his mind. It made the rest of him better, so it stands to reason it would affect his brain pan, too. He doesn’t tell them this—he didn’t then and he won’t now—but he knows his mind is different, that he remembers more and more clearly, that his thoughts come in a different way than Before. He spent his first year awake reading up on politics and all the history he missed, and this second year is dedicated to absorbing user manuals and suffering through Stark’s condescending lectures on technology.

It would be funny if they didn’t honestly think he’s a moron. They’re staring at him slack-jawed, but all he did was ask about when the patch would come through for the new communicators. He’s been awake for two years for Christ’s sake—how long did they think it would take for him to adapt? He used to fix the radios in the hospital whenever he was in with the asthma, and one time he even re-wired the switchboard. Give him a chance to look at what he’s looking at and he can make sense of almost anything. And he appreciates the stuff they’ve got now, the clunky transistor Peggy once handed him replaced by chips smaller than his fingernail. It’s a kind of miracle, really, when he thought he’d seen everything in a secret bunker in Brooklyn. And though he’s been told not to say so in public, he fucking _loves_ the guns they’ve got now. So much more reliable and accurate than what he was used to. He spends a lot of time with Hawkeye, learning different weapons, until he settles on an M-16 modified just for him. He names her Louise and she’s his favorite thing about the future.

He remembers the last good night of sleep he ever got.

Then the day came and Bucky fell and seventy-two hours later he was making Peggy a promise he wouldn’t keep. 

He’s a soldier. He was born into a world of poverty and deprivation where he had to fight three times harder than anyone just to live and he was forged in a fire stoked by men desperate to defeat one who would subjugate the world. He was meant to be the ultimate fighter, a walking weapon—so why is everyone looking at him like that? All he did was strike down the gunner dogging Stark. It’s not like he didn’t know what would happen when he angled his shield just so and put it through that guy’s throat. Should he apologize for the mess? Is that the problem? Because surely they’re not shocked that he could kill someone like that—that he can kill at all. What do they think he did back in the war? Do they think he was playing dress-up the _whole_ time?

Why do they think he doesn’t sleep? What do they imagine he dreams about? He could tell them, but he wonders if they want to hear about what it was like to walk a battlefield and try to match limbs with torsos, or to see a man who was laughing while sharing a canteen get half his face blown off. Or he could tell them about that man at Janowska, or another at Dachau, or any man in between that stood in front of his shield, not behind it. He hears Bucky’s scream in the echo of their shouting and sees Peggy’s face in every pretty gal on the street. There are days that his dog tags are a noose and days when he stands in the shower with the water turned as hot as it will go because he’s just so goddamned cold all the time now. But the worst is the remembering because he can’t control it and it all feels like it’s just happened yesterday, not seventy years ago. Some nights he prays for sleep and others he fights it off, never sure which is worse—his reality or his dreams. 

He lies down at night and prays for an oblivion he is never granted.

He remembers.

He remembers.

He remembers.

**Author's Note:**

> Janowska was a concentration camp in Poland. It was shut down by the Nazis in November of 1943, and while "cleaning up" the mass graves, the prisoners revolted and escaped. Most were recaptured and killed, but some did escape. Despite the horrible ending, it, like Treblinka, is a pretty powerful story about perservance and survival amid a very dark time. It also fits the timeline of Cap arriving in Europe in November 1943 (in the movieverse), though I've never been clear on exactly where in Europe he was supposed to be. 
> 
> German translation: "I'm in charge here".
> 
> "XO" is jargon for commanding officer.
> 
> The bit about Anneliese and Cap's sex life is purely my own invention, largely because the Cap in the movie is a bit older than the one in the comics and I found it kind of incredible that he would have NO experience at all by that age. He certainly knew enough to get what Peggy was really saying in that red dress scene.


End file.
